Administrative/Regulatory
Aug. 7, 2002
Pointing Out Bias
Forum Column - By Harold Johnson - Has the University of California developed a sneaky way around Proposition 209, the 1996 California law outlawing race preferences by government, including racial quotas in student admissions? Red flags are raised by the university's new "comprehensive review" admission process for deciding on applicants to individual University of California campuses.
By Harold Johnson
Has the University of California developed a sneaky way around Proposition 209, the 1996 California law outlawing race preferences by government, including racial quotas in student admissions? Red flags are raised by the university's new "comprehensive review" admission process for deciding on applicants to individual University of California campuses. Adopted by the regents last fall, and implemented for the first time with the freshman class that's entering later this month, the admission system de-emphasizes grades and test scores while adding to the mix a host of subjective criteria such as family hardships and personal challenges.
It's all billed as an innocent attempt to broaden the student body at each campus in a socioeconomic sense by giving more opportunity to kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. But many who want the university to obey the law and refrain from racial bias are asking: Are these "comprehensive" factors actually chosen as proxies for race? Do they amount to camouflaged quotas?
It's hard not to be suspicious when you read about a recent comment by former UCLA admissions director Rae Lee Siporin. According to a July 12 article in The Wall Street Journal, Siporin said that merely using poverty as an indicator of disadvantage wouldn't help middle-class blacks and Hispanics and would "pull in" lots of low-income Asians.
State Assemblyman Marco Antonio Firebaugh, D-Cudahy, also has made a statement from which one might infer that the real, underlying motive for adopting a complex "comprehensive" formula for choosing disadvantaged applicants, instead of using income alone as an indicator of minority status, might be to favor some ethnic groups over others. "We found that using poverty yields a lot of poor white kids and poor Asian kids," he said.
There's also this eyebrow-raising fact: In the comprehensive admissions schemes of a number of University of California campuses, extra points are given if an applicant has been involved in one of the "outreach" programs sponsored by the university system. But outreach isn't necessarily offered at all high schools, and the program's governing policy says, "to the extent possible under the law, [outreach] should emphasize increases in under-represented racial and ethnic minority participation in postsecondary education."
Reaching out to people from disadvantaged backgrounds is perfectly legal. Making such help contingent on a recipient's color, however, flouts Proposition 209 - and this is the injustice that the university system perhaps is perpetrating.
Among the losers are high-achieving Asians from struggling backgrounds. For instance, Stanley Park, a Korean high school student from Irvine who can claim both academic strength and personal hardships, was denied admission at the university's Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses, even while Hispanic kids with weaker academics were let in. Park scored an impressive 1500 out of 1600 on his SAT college-admissions exam. When not studying, he tutored children to help with the rent after his mother contracted cancer. All this wasn't enough to pass "comprehensive review" at the two campuses he most wanted to attend.
"It is simply shameful that it is worth less to be poor and Asian than to be poor and Hispanic," commented David Benjamin, owner of an Irvine-based SAT-preparation business. He has told me of a number of students from the Irvine area, many of them Asians from low-income households, who were rejected at Berkeley or UCLA despite strong grades and scores.
There are numbers to back up the suspicions that the system has a race-based tilt: UCLA admitted 9 percent more Latinos and 19 percent more African-Americans for this coming fall, but fewer Asians and whites.
Beyond the possibility of illegal bias, comprehensive review also flunks the simple test of fairness. Each University of California campus has its own version of "comprehensive review," and there's no standardization of what factors get weighed more heavily in reviewing applicants. While some campuses offer details on their Web sites, Berkeley has chosen not to make its process public, and UCLA's is vague and hard to analyze.
At the San Diego campus, an admissions committee devised a point system in which various experiences and circumstances are given numerical values. For example, "raised by a single parent" receives 200 points, "Disability" receives 400 points and "First generation to attend college" receives 250 points.
These fundamentally arbitrary yardsticks seem very arbitrary. If an applicant raised by a single parent gets 200 points added, how many points are added for one raised by his grandmother or in a foster home?
Moreover, the "personal statement" part of the admissions process is ripe for abuse and is an invitation for the implementation of hidden agendas. Although applicants are encouraged to write about difficult experiences, there are no effective means of verifying what is said in these essays. Also, the sheer numbers - UCLA alone receives more than 38,000 statements - make follow-up impossible. How can this Everest of essays be given any thoughtful, uniform analysis?
A great public university owes the taxpayers who fund it rigorous objectivity and scrupulous openness in how it decides whom to admit. If the University of California doesn't develop more of both quickly, it could face a revolt from angry taxpayers, parents and would-be applicants. Meanwhile, if intentional race bias is confirmed, "comprehensive review" will surely wind up in court.
Harold Johnson is an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento.
Columnist
For reprint rights or to order a copy of your photo:
Email
Jeremy_Ellis@dailyjournal.com
for prices.
Direct dial: 213-229-5424
Send a letter to the editor:
Email: letters@dailyjournal.com